The Satanic Verses (79 page)

The dead grew in number, and the groups of unsettled pilgrims around the Mercedes got larger night by night. Mirza Saeed began to tell them stories. He told them about lemmings, and how the enchantress Circe turned men into pigs; he told, too, the story of a pipe-player who lured a town’s children into a mountain-crack. When he had told this tale in their own language he recited verses in English, so that they could listen to the music of the poetry even though they didn’t understand the words. ‘Hamelin town’s in Brunswick,’ he began. ‘Near famous Hanover City. The River Weser, deep and wide, washes its walls on the southern side …’

Now he had the satisfaction of seeing the girl Ayesha advance, looking furious, while the butterflies glowed like the campfire behind her, making it appear as though flames were streaming from her body.

‘Those who listen to the Devil’s verses, spoken in the Devil’s tongue,’ she cried, ‘will go to the Devil in the end.’

‘It’s a choice, then,’ Mirza Saeed answered her, ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea.’

Eight weeks had passed, and relations between Mirza Saeed and his wife Mishal had so deteriorated that they were no longer on speaking terms. By now, and in spite of the cancer that had turned her as grey as funeral ash, Mishal had become Ayesha’s chief lieutenant and most devoted disciple. The doubts of other marchers
had only strengthened her own faith, and for these doubts she unequivocally blamed her husband.

‘Also,’ she had rebuked him in their last conversation, ‘there is no warmth in you any more. I feel afraid to approach.’

‘No warmth?’ he yelled. ‘How can you say it? No warmth? For whom did I come running on this damnfool pilgrimage? To look after whom? Because I love whom? Because I am so worried about, so sad about, so filled with misery about whom? No warmth? Are you a stranger? How can you say such a thing?’

‘Listen to yourself,’ she said in a voice which had begun to fade into a kind of smokiness, an opacity. ‘Always anger. Cold anger, icy, like a fort.’

‘This isn’t anger,’ he bellowed. ‘This is anxiety, unhappiness, wretchedness, injury, pain. Where can you hear anger?’

‘I hear it,’ she said. ‘Everyone can hear, for miles around.’

‘Come with me,’ he begged her. ‘I’ll take you to the top clinics in Europe, Canada, the USA. Trust in Western technology. They can do marvels. You always liked gadgets, too.’

‘I am going on a pilgrimage to Mecca,’ she said, and turned away.

‘You damn stupid bitch,’ he roared at her back. ‘Just because you’re going to die doesn’t mean you have to take all these people with you.’ But she walked away across the roadside camp-site, never looking back; and now that he’d proved her point by losing control and speaking the unspeakable he fell to his knees and wept. After that quarrel Mishal refused to sleep beside him any more. She and her mother rolled out their bedding next to the butterfly-shrouded prophetess of their Meccan quest.

By day, Mishal worked ceaselessly among the pilgrims, reassuring them, bolstering their faith, gathering them together beneath the wing of her gentleness. Ayesha had started retreating deeper and deeper into silence, and Mishal Akhtar became, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the pilgrims. But there was one pilgrim over whom she lost her grip: Mrs Qureishi, her mother, the wife of the director of the state bank.

The arrival of Mr Qureishi, Mishal’s father, was quite an event. The pilgrims had stopped in the shade of a line of plane-trees and were busy gathering brushwood and scouring cookpots when the motorcade was sighted. At once Mrs Qureishi, who was twenty-five pounds lighter than she had been at the beginning of the walk, leaped squeakily to her feet and tried frantically to brush the dirt off her clothes and to put her hair in order. Mishal saw her mother fumbling feebly with a molten lipstick and asked, ‘What’s bugging you, ma? Relax, na.’

Her mother pointed feebly at the approaching cars. Moments later the tall, severe figure of the great banker was standing over them. ‘If I had not seen it I would not have believed,’ he said. ‘They told me, but I pooh-poohed. Therefore it took me this long to find out. To vanish from Peristan without a word: now what in tarnation?’

Mrs Qureishi shook helplessly under her husband’s eyes, beginning to cry, feeling the calluses on her feet and the fatigue that had sunk into every pore of her body. ‘O God, I don’t know, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘God knows what came over.’

‘Don’t you know I occupy a delicate post?’ Mr Qureishi cried. ‘Public confidence is of essence. How does it look then that my wife gallivants with bhangis?’

Mishal, embracing her mother, told her father to stop bullying. Mr Qureishi saw for the first time that his daughter had the mark of death on her forehead and deflated instantly like an inner tube. Mishal told him about the cancer, and the promise of the seer Ayesha that a miracle would occur in Mecca, and she would be completely cured.

‘Then let me fly you to Mecca, pronto,’ her father pleaded. ‘Why walk if you can go by Airbus?’

But Mishal was adamant. ‘You should go away,’ she told her father. ‘Only the faithful can make this thing come about. Mummy will look after me.’

Mr Qureishi in his limousine helplessly joined Mirza Saeed at the rear of the procession, constantly sending one of the two servants
who had accompanied him on motor-scooters to ask Mishal if she would like food, medicine, Thums Up, anything at all. Mishal turned down all his offers, and after three days – because banking is banking – Mr Qureishi departed for the city, leaving behind one of the motor-scooter chaprassis to serve the women. ‘He is yours to command,’ he told them. ‘Don’t be stupid now. Make this as easy as you can.’

The day after Mr Qureishi’s departure, the chaprassi Gul Muhammad ditched his scooter and joined the foot-pilgrims, knotting a handkerchief around his head to indicate his devotion. Ayesha said nothing, but when she saw the scooter-wallah join the pilgrimage she grinned an impish grin that reminded Mirza Saeed that she was, after all, not only a figure out of a dream, but also a flesh-and-blood young girl.

Mrs Qureishi began to complain. The brief contact with her old life had broken her resolve, and now that it was too late she had started thinking constantly about parties and soft cushions and glasses of iced fresh lime soda. It suddenly seemed wholly unreasonable to her that a person of her breeding should be asked to go barefoot like a common sweeper. She presented herself to Mirza Saeed with a sheepish expression on her face.

‘Saeed, son, do you hate me completely?’ she wheedled, her plump features arranging themselves in a parody of coquettishness.

Saeed was appalled by her grimace. ‘Of course not,’ he managed to say.

‘But you do, you loathe me, and my cause is hopeless,’ she flirted.

‘Ammaji,’ Saeed gulped, ‘what are you saying?’

‘Because I have from time to time spoken roughly to you.’

‘Please forget it,’ Saeed said, bemused by her performance, but she would not. ‘You must know it was all for love, isn’t it? Love,’ said Mrs. Qureishi, ‘it is a many-splendoured thing.’

‘Makes the world go round,’ Mirza Saeed agreed, trying to enter into the spirit of the conversation.

‘Love conquers all,’ Mrs Qureishi confirmed. ‘It has conquered
my anger. This I must demonstrate to you by riding with you in your motor.’

Mirza Saeed bowed. ‘It is yours, Ammaji.’

‘Then you will ask those two village men to sit in front with you. Ladies must be protected, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ he replied.

The story of the village that was walking to the sea had spread all over the country, and in the ninth week the pilgrims were being pestered by journalists, local politicos in search of votes, businessmen who offered to sponsor the march if the yatris would only consent to wear sandwich boards advertising various goods and services, foreign tourists looking for the mysteries of the East, nostalgic Gandhians, and the kind of human vultures who go to motor-car races to watch the crashes. When they saw the host of chameleon butterflies and the way they both clothed the girl Ayesha and provided her with her only solid food, these visitors were amazed, and retreated with confounded expectations, that is to say with a hole in their pictures of the world that they could not paper over. Photographs of Ayesha were appearing in all the papers, and the pilgrims even passed advertising hoardings on which the lepidopteral beauty had been painted three times as large as life, beside slogans reading
Our cloths also are as delicate as a butterfly’s wing
, or suchlike. Then more alarming news reached them. Certain religious extremist groupings had issued statements denouncing the ‘Ayesha Haj’ as an attempt to ‘hijack’ public attention and to ‘incite communal sentiment’. Leaflets were being distributed – Mishal picked them up off the road – in which it was claimed that ‘Padyatra, or foot-pilgrimage, is an ancient, pre-Islamic tradition of national culture, not imported property of Mughal immigrants.’ Also: ‘Purloining of this tradition by so-called Ayesha Bibiji is flagrant and deliberate inflammation of already sensitive situation.’

‘There will be no trouble,’ the kahin broke her silence to announce.

Gibreel dreamed a suburb:

As the Ayesha Haj neared Sarang, the outermost suburb of the great metropolis on the Arabian Sea towards which the visionary girl was leading them, journalists, politicos and police officers redoubled their visits. At first the policemen threatened to disband the march forcibly; the politicians, however, advised that this would look very like a sectarian act and could lead to outbreaks of communal violence from top to bottom of the country. Eventually the police chiefs agreed to permit the march, but groused menacingly about being ‘unable to guarantee safe passages’ for the pilgrims. Mishal Akhtar said: ‘We are going on.’

The suburb of Sarang owed its relative affluence to the presence of substantial coal deposits nearby. It turned out that the coal-miners of Sarang, men whose lives were spent boring pathways through the earth – ‘parting’ it, one might say – could not stomach the notion that a girl could do the same, with a wave of her hand, for the sea. Cadres of certain communalist groupings had been at work, inciting the miners to violence, and as a result of the activities of these agents provocateurs a mob was forming, carrying banners demanding:
NO ISLAMIC PADYATRA! BUTTERFLY WITCH, GO HOME
.